


if you are a friend of any sort

by tenworms



Category: Archive 81 (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hair Dye, Memory Loss, Sibling Bonding, set nebulously post episode 28: exist in the space you are currently occupying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25318345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenworms/pseuds/tenworms
Summary: Chris dyes her hair.
Relationships: Christine Anderson & Nicholas Waters
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	if you are a friend of any sort

**Author's Note:**

> based on a conversation i had with monty [gayprophets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayprophets/pseuds/gayprophets), so some of the details are theirs!
> 
> title is from don't leave me (ne me quitte pas) by regina spektor, but only because i couldn't figure out which lyrics from obedear by purity ring to use

Chris woke up rocking. Or, well, she woke up horribly still— it was her blood that was rocking, some tide in her body. 

She stared up at the popcorn ceiling. The motel room felt too small and too big, the walls too far away and too stiff, the air too sweet and dusty. Everything was so still, so quiet. Nick wasn’t even snoring for once. It was silent enough that she could just about hear the soft puff of his breath. The inhale, quiet and wheezy, and then the exhale. The pauses in between. Her joints felt stuck, like something creaking in every vertebrae, something that she’d quietly break if she moved. And in between, the rush and crash of rocking waves, unremembered but achingly familiar. 

What had she dreamed about? Was it a nightmare? 

(In the old stories, only terrible things made your hair turn stark white. She didn’t think her chest would ache like this for a terrible thing.) 

The rustle of her pillow as she turned to the bedside table was loud and flat and awful, too stiff, but the return of silence that followed was almost worse. She stared at the alarm clock. As she watched, the glowing red numbers switched from 3:32 to 3:33 with an almost audible _tap_.

The heater hissed and rattled to life. It whirred, buzzing and arhythmic, like the sound of holding a seashell over your ear. Awful and wrong— someone had told her, once, as a kid, that the seashell thing would sound like the ocean. It wasn’t true, it— felt fake— but she couldn’t— that’s not how the ocean sounded really, she knew. How did she know that? And not like a piece of trivia, like a bone-deep truth. 

How long had she been in the dream, before? What had she lost? 

At least with hum of the stupid awful heater the rustle of her sheets didn’t feel like a disruption anymore. 

She had to get out of here. 

She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed. Took a moment to feel a little gross about touching the motel room carpet with bare feet, then tiptoed over to the bathroom.

In the dark, she almost couldn’t find the doorknob. She shut the door behind her carefully before feeling the wallpaper for the light switch. The bulb over the sink hummed on— but the white noise was more tolerable this time, something warm and gentle rather than a bastardization of something she couldn’t quite remember. 

She looked exhausted in the mirror. Between the shitty light and the white hair, she looked years older than she was. Like she’d aged without noticing. It’d been a while since she’d really looked at herself— were those laugh lines new, or had she just never noticed them before? 

She leaned across the sink and met her own eyes. Got close enough that she could only look at one eye at a time, switched between them and tried to catch the motion. She never could do it: there was always that little gap in-between she couldn’t see. 

God, whatever had changed her hair had gotten _all_ of her hair. Her eyebrows, her eyelashes, even the thin soft fuzz above her upper lip: stark white. 

The phrase “salt-kissed” came into her mind unbidden, and suddenly she was on the tile floor leaning against the cabinet, arm pressed to her mouth, sobbing violently and soundlessly. Something about the rhythmic shaking chased away the last ghost of the rocking sensation. But salt water still dripped down and soaked her sleeve as she cried. She seemed to be full of salt water, these days. 

—

The 24-hour drugstore on the corner did sell hair dye, apparently. Not a huge selection: just boxes of natural colors, and a couple bottles of red and blue. She wasn’t even going to consider the boxed shit, obviously. Plus, why go back to a normal color when she’d lost the red in a magic dream ritual? Just the idea of covering up her supernaturally-acquired color with, like, light brown felt... pathetic, like trying to be normal. Or depressingly like hiding away something beautiful.

So she turned to the red and blue: she could’ve taken the red again, but something about reusing the color didn’t feel right. Redhead-red felt off-limits already, like it was used up for her forever: and the idea of bypassing that by going brighter would’ve felt petulant, almost. Spiteful. And maybe she didn’t remember enough to know what she should’ve been feeling, but it definitely wasn’t spite. Not about the hair itself, anyway.

Plus, that bottle of dark inky blue— hell yeah, she’d look good in blue. 

She grabbed vaseline and rubber gloves, paid in cash at the front, and left with a plastic bag. 

—

She was as quiet as possible coming back to the motel room, but the door still clicked loudly when she unlocked it. She pushed her sneakers off and walked around in socks to make up for it. The silence had broken somehow while she’d been gone: Nick was snoring again, and the sounds of the city were back. 

She tiptoed to the bathroom, holding the plastic bag as still as possible to make sure she wouldn’t rustle it and wake up Nick, wincing when it rustled anyway because it was still a goddamn plastic bag. 

She set the bag down on the counter, turned on the light, and closed the door. 

She eyed the total lack of ventilation. 

She opened the door a tiny crack and turned on the fan. (Hey— if he’d slept through that heater, right?)

Then came the careful process of opening the vaseline and smoothing it against her hairline, her ear. The slow dissolution of the vaseline on her hands under soap and running water, the powderiness of the crisp white towel, the small tight snap of the rubber gloves. A familiar process. A meditative one.

She poured blue dye into one hand, squished it between her fingers, brought her hand up and pulled it through a clump of hair. She settled into it easily, the pattern.

Nick poked his head in the door when she’d already finished the hair around her face. His brow was furrowed, and he opened his mouth like he was about to ask a question— but he stopped, rubbed his eyes, looked at her again, and whispered, “I can get the back for you, if you want.”

Chris nodded, silent, and he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and went to work. They’d done this before. It had been different, though. When they’d dyed her hair red, there’d been jokes and laughter. She’d threatened to smear the dye on his face if he didn’t stop being such an uptight little narc, made fun of him while he shaved off his mustache as the dye set. And they’d been on the run, going into hiding, but more important was the fact that he was her brother and she loved him. 

It didn’t feel like that now. Something had clicked out of place in her chest, and whatever’d replaced it was lonely and desolate. Like, they were still family; they were still performing this little ritual of change together; they were even safe this time: but there was something missing. Something hollow. Even if she couldn’t remember, she knew.

Nick was way more careful about pulling her hair than she was. His weird bony hands were feather-light and gentle as he worked. Neither of them spoke. 

— 

They sat against the cabinets. Chris sat curled up with their arms resting on their knees, carefully tense, holding her hair away from anything while the dye set. Nick sat with his palms against the floor like Chris was a bird that he’d have to spring up to catch at any moment. 

“Why—” Nick’s whisper came out hoarse; he cleared his throat. “What happened?”

Chris shrugged, weird and awkward in the position she was in. “Had a dream.” She looked at the far wall of the bathroom, tracked the vertical stripes of the wallpaper, tried to find the glints of light denoting its texture. “Couldn’t… I don’t know, it’s dumb.”

“It’s not dumb,” said Nick. There was a pause, the sound of Nick deciding what to say. (This had a specific sound: he shifted around, opened his mouth and closed it a couple times.) “A… dream?” he said hesitantly. “Was it the…” He gestured, a little _you know_ motion.

“Mm,” said Chris, still not looking at him.

Nick nodded. “You can tell me about it, if you want,” he said. “It sounds—”

It all came out, unexpectedly, in a rush: “It’s like— I don’t know, dude. Like, there’s this _gap_. It was only, what, five minutes? And I can’t remember anything except, like, maybe the ocean? But—” she dropped her forehead to rest on her arms, careful not to smear the still-wet dye, held her chest still so she wouldn’t start sobbing again— “Payphone said someone who loved me would be ripped from my life. And— I don’t know, it just seems like the obvious answer.”

“Yeah,” Nick said quietly. A rustle of fabric as he lifted his hand. She felt, rather than saw, it hover in the space above her. It stayed there for a moment before he squeezed her shoulder, gently, and hesitantly rubbed her upper back. “Yeah.” 

"Whatever," she muttered. "It's not like it matters. I can't even remember it." But she knew she was lying.

Nick didn't have anything to say to that, and she closed her eyes against the dark of the space between her arms. 

—

They washed the dye out together in the bathtub, under the faucet. It came out cold. And it wasn’t a purification ritual, this time: it wasn’t _for_ anything. No magic purpose. Nothing about this would bring her arcane knowledge, bring back memories. But she knelt on the tile anyway, closed her eyes, Nick’s hands gentle and sure on the back of her head as she sputtered again under the fresh water. 

When her hair was dry, she checked in the mirror again. She didn’t look like someone had taken something from her anymore. She looked… like a comic book character, actually. She shook her head and watched the blue swish around her face. 

“Thanks,” she said, quiet, and Nick gave her a watery smile. 

The sun was coming up now. They collapsed into their respective beds anyway. Chris didn’t dream this time.

**Author's Note:**

> summary & tags will change when i put up the second part! (edit: it is unlikely that there will ever be a second part this is probably all you are getting!! sorry ahhh)
> 
> you can find me on tumblr at @melody-pendras!


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